Does the profiler read any of the GPU's performance counters? Would be super cool to have an open source tool that can capture the same data nsight compute does.
[ All from my experience on home GPUs, and in lah with 2 nodes with 2 80GB H100 each. Not extensively benchmarked ]
Events like kernel launch, which this profiler reads right now, is a very small overhead (1-2%). Kernel level metrics like DRAM utilisation, cache hit rate, SM occupancy, etc usually give you a 5-10% overhead. If you want to plot a flame graph at a instruction level (mostly useful for learning purposes) then you go off the rails - even 25% overhead I have seen. And finally full traces add tons of overhead but that's pretty much expected - they anyways produce GBs of profiling data.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_performance_counter